A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [304]
Despite the silence and the shame, Father and I were close at that time, as we had been the previous winter, a year and a month before, when Mother's condition took a turn for the worse and he and I were like a pair of stretcher bearers carrying an injured person up a steep slope.
This time we were carrying each other.
All through that winter we never opened a window. As though we were afraid to lose the special smell of the apartment. As though we were comfortable with each other's smells. Even when they got very thick and concentrated. Dark half moons appeared under Father's eyes like those my mother had when she couldn't sleep. I would wake up in the night in a panic and peep into his room to see if he was sitting up like her, staring sadly at the window. But my father did not sit at the window staring at the clouds or the moon. He bought himself a little Phillips wireless set with a green eye and put it by his bed, and he lay in the dark listening to everything. At midnight, when the Voice of Israel stopped broadcasting, to be replaced by a monotonous buzz, he reached out and tuned to the BBC World Service from London.
Late one afternoon Grandma Shlomit suddenly appeared, carrying two dishes of food she had cooked for us. The moment I opened the door she was appalled at what met her eyes and by the stench that assailed her nostrils. Almost without a word she turned tail and ran. But by seven o'clock next morning she was back, armed this time with two cleaning women and a whole arsenal of cleaning materials and disinfectants. She set up her tactical command HQ on a bench in the yard opposite the front door, from where she directed the mopping-up operations, which lasted for three days.
So the apartment was put to rights, and my father and I stopped neglecting the household chores. One of the cleaners was hired to come in twice a week. The apartment was thoroughly aired and cleaned, and a couple of months later we even decided to have it painted.
But ever since those weeks of chaos I have been subject to a compulsive desire for tidiness that makes the lives of those around me a misery. Any scrap of paper that is not in its right place, any unfolded newspaper or unwashed cup threatens my peace of mind, if not my sanity. To this day, like some kind of secret policeman or like Frankenstein's monster, or with something of my Grandma Shlomit's obsession with cleanliness and tidiness, I scour the house every few hours, ruthlessly banishing to the depths of Siberia any poor object that has the misfortune to find itself on a surface, or hiding away in some godforsaken drawer any letter or leaflet that someone has left on the table because he or she was called to the phone, and emptying out, rinsing, and putting facedown in the dishwasher a cup of coffee that one of my victims has left to cool down a bit, mercilessly clearing away keys, spectacles, notes, medicines, a piece of cake that someone has unwisely taken his eyes off for a moment: everything falls into the jaws of this greedy monster so that there will be some order at last in this topsy-turvy house. So that it doesn't so much as hint at the way my father and I lived at that time when we tacitly agreed that we should sit down among the ashes and scrape ourselves with a potsherd, just so she should know.
Then one day my father made a furious assault on Mother's drawers and her side of their closet: the only things that survived his wrath were a few items that her sisters and parents had requested as keepsakes, via me, and in fact on one of my trips to Tel Aviv I took them with me in a cardboard box tied up with